3DC19

Early in 2020 things were going great and seemingly normal. I had just won an award to attend the annual AMUG conference in Chicago. We had just had our first and very successful ‘industry night’ at the fab lab. We had a few field trips and a few groups come through for some fab lab fun.

Things started to look a little different after a field trip. That Friday night I went grocery shopping with my wife and realized things are going to be different for a while…

I started to wonder what I could do to help and started researching options for PPE I could make. I found out that the fab lab and college were going to close the next week. I started 3D printing the Prusa face shield as it was the 1st one I saw gaining traction.

For days I stalked forums, Slack Channels and reaching out to people doing the same.

A friend of mine at Ultimaker, Luis Rodriguez shared a new design with me late at night by an Erik Cederberg. The version became known by the name, 3DVerkstan. The benefits were no elastic band needed (harder and harder to find), shorter print time (30-40 minutes vs 2.5 hours), and the plastic could use overhead transparencies and a 3 hole punch to make the pattern! This was it! I started a prototype that night! The next morning I used a 2 liter pop bottle for the plastic.

At this time I was currently working with several different people and a couple different groups throughout West Michigan. I was connected with Jack Russell of Rolar Products in Muskegon, MI and we both had our 5 minutes of fame in a Fox 17 news spot. My 3D printer farm at home started to come together.

Fox 17 Online (WXMI)

My friend from college, Stephen Weirenga, of Perception Engineering was following everything as close as me. and got his team to work as well. He also had some good contacts as to where to find the clear plastic.

More and more people and organizations started to hear efforts and there were a couple more news articles and interviews about my own personal efforts.

Muskegon Times

Muskegon Channel – Andy O’Reilly

The movement started to gain steam and traction when several group made the decision to combine efforts into 1 local West Michigan group. We focused on 1 design, the 3DVerkstan face shield and even setup a distribution center at Hybrid Machining (Jeff Robinson) in Holland, MI.

3DC19 was born. We had started the development of a website and eventually even had a marketing team involved. They worked on brand recognition including this awesome poster inspired by Rosie the Riveter.

So we had a logo, a website that evolved daily to suite what we needed, we had social media pages, videographers, photographers and more media were reaching out to document what we were doing.

We had built up a 3D printer fleet of over 400. These were not just in West Michigan either! We had people, companies and schools across the country signing up to print, mailing us items for us to distribute.

We heard a lot of great feedback that our movement gave people a purpose. Kids were waking up in the middle of the night to change over 3D prints. Engineers that were laid off were stopping printing baby Yoda’s and putting their machines to work. It was nice to know that I wasn’t the only one that felt lost against this invisible enemy.

Right from the start of the formation of our massive 3D printer ‘fleet’ as we came to call it we knew the solution for mass production was going to be plastic injection molding. Luckily one of my fab lab volunteers, Erik Peterson, knew how to design things for injection molding. So without having a clear path I told him early on to start working on that. Later on I connected with someone I had found via Instagram of all places, Jason Murphy of NXC Mfg who had connections in the plastic injection mold industry. He put his feelers out and Concept Molds of Schoolcraft, MI jumped onboard to help.

So we had a mold on its way, our part was optimized for the process and we had a large supply of clear plastic shields on the way from a local manufacturer. The crazy thing is that in the end we probably donated about the same if not more 3D printed version of face shields while waiting for injection molding to come online. We had just built up such an army of printers that we were comparable to the speed of injection molding. But our printer fleet was growing tired, people were running out of materials, returning to work or online school, and equipment was breaking. Enter the era of plastic injection molding.

The crazy thing about this effort is that it wasn’t a traditional company that you might start. There were not set job positions but we all sort of fell into our roles and just did stuff because we all wanted to help.

This is part of the team that made it happen.

People and Organizations That Were Helped